a spreading of wings, a bating of breath, a sense of something coming

Damage

The sickness in me and you is the sickness permeating everything. The poison sinking into skin and under nails, causing these sores and uclers to appear on our lips and tongues, making these bones brittle and break up is the same one getting slipped into us as we laid helpless and innocently ignorant in front of TV screens and moniters going bleep, bleep, bleep. Telling the world of our parents our heartbeats and if we’d get TB or if we’d be clean.

We break ourselves because the brokenness inside is too intanigble to feel. We shed some blood because the darkness inside is too black to illuminate with flashlights outside our skins. When we were young, we all held the glass of flashlight bulbs up to our thinnest parts, put them up above our heads and marveled how the light got through, all orange and brilliant. The veins and bones, muscles and tendons lit up like a stage moved before our eyes. But it couldn’t get the cancer out when we were older. Hold the light up, even now, and you can see the tumors replicate, complicated, killing you.

No way out, trapped, caged animals attack themselves.

This ink sinks in and never leaves. I hold it out for you to see. It’s beautiful; do you like the shape? A metal needles pierces a hole that a stainless steel bar will hold. The skin is supposed to heal around it. Proof that we can still be alive even with these rods sunk in our hearts.

My metaphor has been inflamed for years and finally, I’m letting it go.
Does your’s burn and swell, or is it good and well?

We all get a little fucked and fucked up and we fuck it up on ourselves on purpose, just so we know.
On the other side, do you feel better?

Good. We’re making progress.
This blade is clean and the scars it leaves are in the shapes of leaves when they fall in the Fall. Are we falling, still? I feel weightless. Aimless. Helpless. Harmless.

This is a condition we can replicate to extricate like needles and knives from skin where cuts make evidence of the things you’re words don’t, can’t, won’t express. We can do the same in high heels or laid out flat across the pavement or in rough, loud music that makes your ears ring. We can thrash against one another, throw punches at the air or pads. We can dance or swallow alcohol until we pass out. We can bike blind down rainforest streets and crash into trees.

There’s a light and a light wind and I feel it brushing past me.
I might as well be home.
Good enough, as good as it gets.

No, but it gets better than even this.
Those scars on arms and splitting the chest it two prove it, that you might heal slow, but you won’t be broken and bleeding, hurting and waiting forever.
The first step is the worst part and it gets easier as we go.

We all suffer and die, so no one is ever alone.
Good enough for me.
—
Now, go and find some hope.
Look up: The Icarus Project